When the first rumble came, no one in the Visa Office, down in the
basement of the Indian Consulate, thought anything of it. Immersed in
regret or hope or trepidation (as is usual for persons planning a major
journey), they took it to be a passing cable-car. Or perhaps the repair
crew who had draped the pavement outside with neon-orange netting,
making entry into the building a feat that required significant
gymnastic skill, had resumed drilling. Uma Sinha watched a flake of
plaster float from the ceiling in a lazy dance until it disappeared into
the implausibly green foliage of the plant that stood at attention in
the corner. She watched, but she didn’t really see it, for she was
mulling over a question that had troubled her for the last several
weeks: Did her boyfriend Ramon love her more than she loved him, and
(should her suspicion that he did so prove correct) was that a good
thing?

Uma snapped shut her copy of Chaucer, which she had brought with her
to compensate for the Medieval Lit class she was missing at the
university. In the last few hours she had managed to progress only a
page and a half into the “Wyfe of Bath’s Tale”—this despite the fact
that the bawdy, cheerful Wyfe was one of her favorite characters. Now
she surrendered to reality: The lobby of the P&V Office, with all
its comings and goings, its calling out of the names of individuals more
fortunate than herself, was not a place suited to erudite endeavors.
She surrendered with ill grace—it was a belief of hers that people ought
to rise above the challenges of circumstance—and glared at the woman
stationed behind the glassed-in customer service window. The woman was
dressed in a blue sari of an electrifying hue. Her hair was gathered
into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she wore a daunting red
dot in the center of her forehead. She ignored Uma superbly, as people
do when faced with those
whose abject destinies they control.

Uma did not trust this woman. When she had arrived this morning,
assured of a nine a.m. appointment with the visa officer, she found
several people swirling around the lobby, and more crowding behind, who
had been similarly assured. When questioned, the woman had shrugged,
pointing to the pile upon which Uma was to place her paperwork. Clients,
she told Uma, would be called according to the order of arrival for an
interview with the visa officer. Here she nodded reverently toward the
office to the side of the lobby. Its closed door bore the name Mr.
V.K.S. Mangalam stenciled in flowery letters on the nubby, opaque glass.
Craning her neck, Uma saw that there was a second door to the office, a
blank wooden slab that opened into the sequestered employees area: the
customer service window and, behind it, desks at which two women sorted
piles of official looking documents into other piles and occasionally
stamped them. The woman at the counter pursed her lips at Uma’s
curiosity and
frostily advised her to take a seat while there was one still available.

Uma sat. What else could she do? But she resolved to keep an eye on
the woman, who looked entirely capable of shuffling the visa
applications around out of bored caprice when no one was watching.

***

Now it was three p.m. A few minutes earlier, the women at the desks
had left on their mid-afternoon break. They had asked the woman in the
blue sari if she wanted to accompany them, and when she had declined,
stating that she would take her break later, they had dissolved into
giggles and whispers which she loftily ignored. There remained four sets
of people in the room, apart from Uma. In the distant corner was an old
Chinese woman dressed in a traditional tunic, accompanied by a fidgety,
sullen girl of thirteen or fourteen who should surely have been in
school. The teenager wore her hair in spikes. Her lipstick was black and
so were her clothes. Did they allow students to attend school dressed
like this nowadays? Uma wondered. Then she felt old-fashioned. From time
to time, grandmother and granddaughter fought in fiery whispers, words
that Uma longed to decipher. She had always been this way:
interested—quite unnecessarily, some would say—in the secrets of
strangers. When flying, she always chose a window seat so that when the
plane took off or landed, she could look down on the tiny houses and
imagine the lives of the people who inhabited them. Now she made up the
dialogue she could not understand.

I missed a big test today because of your stupid appointment. If I
fail Algebra, just remember it was your fault—because you were too
scared to ride the bus here by yourself.

Whose fault was it that you overslept six times this month and
didn’t get to school for your morning classes, Missy? And your poor
parents, slaving at their jobs, thinking you were hard at work! Maybe I
should tell them what really goes on at home while they’re killing
themselves to provide for you . . .

Near them sat a Caucasian couple about a decade older than Uma’s
parents, their clothes hinting at affluence: he in a dark woolen jacket
and shoes that looked Italian, she in a cashmere sweater and a navy blue
pleated skirt that reached her calves. He riffled through The Wall
Street Journal; she, the frailer of the pair, was knitting something
brown and unidentifiable. Twice he stepped outside—to smoke a cigarette,
Uma guessed. Sometimes, glancing sideways, she saw him watching his
wife. Uma couldn’t decipher the look on his face. Was it anxiety?
Annoyance? Once she thought it was fear. Or maybe it was hope, the flip
side of fear. The only time she heard them speak to each other was when
he asked what he could pick up for her from the deli across the street

“I’m not hungry,” she replied in a leave-me-alone tone.

“You have to eat something. Build up your strength. We have a big trip coming up.”

She knitted another row before responding. “Pick up whatever looks
good to you, then.” After he left, she put down the knitting needles and
stared at her hands.

To Uma’s left sat a young man of about thirty years, an Indian by
his features, but fair-skinned as though he came from one of the
mountain tribes. He wore dark glasses, a scowl and a beard of the kind
that in recent years made airport security pull you out of line and
frisk you. To her other side sat a lanky African American, perhaps in
his fifties, Uma couldn’t tell. His shaved head and the sharp, ascetic
bones of his face gave him an ageless, monkish appearance, though the
effect was somewhat undercut by the sparkly studs in his ears. When
Uma’s stomach gave an embarrassingly loud growl a couple of hours back
(trusting in the nine a.m. appointment, she hadn’t brought with her
anything more substantial than a bagel and an apple), he dug into a
large rucksack and solemnly offered her a Quaker Oats Peanut Butter Bar.

It was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different
races randomly thrown together. Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini
U. N. summit in here. Whatever were all these people planning to do in
India?

***

Uma herself was going to India because of her parents’ folly. They
had come to the United States some twenty years back as young
professionals, when Uma was a child. They had loved their jobs, plunging
enthusiastically into their workdays. They had celebrated weekends with
similar gusto, getting together (in between soccer games and Girl Scout
meetings and Bharatnatyam classes for Uma) with other suburbanite
Indian families. They had orchestrated elaborate, schizophrenic meals
(mustard fish and fried bitter gourd for the parents; spaghetti with
meatballs and peach pie for the children) and bemoaned the corruption of
Indian politicians. In recent years, they had spoken of moving to San
Diego to spend their golden years by the ocean (such nice weather,
perfect for our old bones). Then, in a dizzying volte-face that Uma
considered most imprudent, her mother had chosen early retirement and
her father had quit his position as a senior administrator for a
computer company to accept a
consultant’s job in India. Together, heartlessly, they had leased out
their house (the house where Uma was born!) and returned to their
hometown of Kolkata.

“But all these years you complained about how terrible Kolkata was,”
Uma had cried, aghast, when they called to inform her of their
decision. Apart from her concern for their well-being, she was vexed at
not having been consulted. “The heat, the dirt, the noise, the crowded
buses, the beggars, the bribes, the diarrhea, the bootlicking, the
streets littered with garbage that never got picked up. How are you
going to handle it?”

To which her mother had replied, with maddening good humor, “But
sweetie, all that has changed. It’s a different India now, India
Shining!”

And perhaps it was, for hadn’t her parents glided effortlessly into
their new life, renting an air-conditioned terrace-top flat and hiring a
retinue of servants to take care of every possible chore? (“I haven’t
washed a single dish since I moved here!” her mother rhapsodized on the
phone.) A chauffeured car whisked her father to his office each morning.
(“I only work from ten to four,” he added proudly from the other
phone.) It returned to take her mother shopping, or to see childhood
friends, or to get a pedicure, or (before Uma could chide her for being
totally frivolous) to volunteer with an agency that educated slum
children. In the evenings her parents attended Rabindra Sangeet concerts
together, or watched movies on gigantic screens in theaters that
resembled palaces, or walked hand in hand (such things were accepted in
India Shining) by the same lake where they had met secretly as college
students, or went to the club for drinks and a game of bridge. They were
invited out every
weekend and sometimes on weeknights as well. They vacationed in Kulu Manali in the summer and Goa in the winter.

Uma was happy for her parents though secretly she disapproved of
their newly hedonistic lifestyle. (Yet how could she object when it was
so much better than what she often saw around her: couples losing
interest in each other, living in wooden togetherness or even breaking
up?) Was it partly that she felt excluded? Or was it that by contrast
her university life, which she had been so proud of, with its
angst-filled film festivals, its cafes where heated intellectual
discussions raged late into the night, its cavernous libraries where one
might, at any moment, bump into a Nobel Laureate, suddenly appeared
lackluster? She said nothing, waiting in a stew of anxiety and
anticipation for this honeymoon with India to be over, for disillusion
and dyspepsia to set in. A year passed. Her mother continued as blithe
as ever, though surely she must have faced problems. Who doesn’t? (Why
then did she conceal them from Uma?) Now and then she urged Uma to
visit. “We’ll go to Agra and see the Taj
Mahal together—we’re saving it for you,” she would say. Or, “I know the
best ayurvedic spa. They give sesame oil massages like you wouldn’t
believe.” In a recent conversation, she’d said, twice, “We miss you. Why
don’t you come visit? We’ll send you a ticket.”

There had been something plaintive about her voice that struck Uma
in the space just below her breastbone. She had missed her parents, too.
Though she had always decried touristic amusements, suddenly she felt a
desire to see the Taj Mahal. “I’ll come for winter break,” she promised
rashly.

“How long is that?”

“Six weeks.”

“Six weeks! Lovely!” her mother said, restored to buoyancy. “That
should give us enough time. Don’t forget, you’ll need a new visa—you
haven’t been to India in ages. Don’t mail them your passport—that takes
forever. Go into the office yourself. You’ll have to wait a bit, but
you’ll get it the same day.”

Only after she had hung up did Uma realize that she had failed to
ask her mother, enough time for what? She also realized that her
boyfriend Ramon, whom her parents knew and had always treated affably
(her father had even given him an Indian nickname, Ramu), had not been
included in the invitation.

She might have let it pass—tickets to India, were, after all,
expensive—but then there was that other conversation, the one where Uma
had said, “It’s a good thing you haven’t sold the house. This way, if
things don’t work out, you’ll have a place to come back to.”

“Oh no, sweetie,” her mother had replied. “We love it in India—we knew we would. The house is there for you, in case—.”

Then her mother had caught herself deftly in mid-sentence and
changed the subject, leaving Uma with the sense that she had been about
to divulge something she knew Uma was not ready to hear.

***

Minutes before the second rumble, Uma felt a craving to see the sun.
Had the gossamer fog that draped the tops of the downtown buildings
when she arrived that morning lifted by now? If so, the sky would be
bright as a Niles lily; if not, it would glimmer like fish-scales.
Suddenly she needed to know which it was. Later she would wonder at the
urgency that had pulled her out of her chair and to her feet. Was it an
instinct like the one that made zoo animals moan and whine for hours
before natural disasters struck? She shouldered her bag and stepped
toward the door. A few more seconds and she would have pushed it open,
run down the corridor and taken the stairs up to the first floor two at a
time, rushing to satisfy the desire that ballooned inside of her. She
would have been outside, lifting her face to the gray drizzle that was
beginning to fall, and this would have been a different story.

But as she turned to go, the door to Mr. Mangalam’s office opened. A
man hurried out, clutching his passport with an air of victory, and
brushed past Uma. The woman in the blue sari picked up the stack of
applications and disappeared into Mr. Mangal’s office through the side
door. She had been doing that every hour or so. For what? Uma thought,
scowling. All the woman needed to do was call out the next name in the
pile. Uma had little hope that that name would be hers, but she paused,
just in case.

It was a good time to phone Ramon. If she were lucky, she would
catch him as he walked across the Student Union plaza from the class he
taught to his laboratory, wending his way between drummers and dim sum
vendors and doomsday orators. Once in the laboratory, he would turn the
phone off, not wanting to be distracted. He was passionate about his
work, Ramon. Sometimes at night when he went to the lab to check on an
experiment, she would accompany him just so she could watch the
stillness that took over his body as he tested and measured and took
notes. Sometimes he forgot she was there. That was when she loved him
most. If she got him on the phone now, she would tell him this.

But the phone would not cooperate. No Service, the small, lighted square declared.

The man with the ear studs looked over and offered her a sympathetic
grimace. “My phone has the same problem,” he said. “That’s the trouble
with these downtown buildings. Maybe if you walk around the room, you’ll
find a spot where it works.”

Phone to her ear, Uma took a few steps forward, though not with much
hope. It felt good to stretch her legs. She watched the woman emerge
from Mr. Mangal’s office, shaking out the creases of her sari, looking
like she had bitten into something sour. Uncharitably, Uma hoped that
Mr. Mangalam had rebuked her for making so many people wait for so many
unnecessary hours. The phone gave a small burp against her ear. But
before she could check if it was working, the rumble rose through the
floor. This time there was no mistaking its intention. It was as though a
giant had placed his mouth against the building’s foundations and
roared. The floor buckled, throwing Uma to the ground. The giant took
the building in both his hands and shook it. A chair flew across the
room at Uma. She raised her left arm to shield herself. The chair
crashed into her wrist and a pain worse than anything she had known
surged through her arm. People were screaming. Feet ran by her, then ran
back again. She tried to
wedge herself beneath one of the chairs, as she had been taught long ago
in grade school, but only her head and shoulders would fit. The
cell-phone was still in her other hand, pressed against her ear. Was
that Ramon’s voice asking her to leave a message, or was it just her
need to hear him?

Above her the ceiling collapsed in an explosion of plaster. Beams
broke apart with the sound of gigantic bones snapping. A light fixture
shattered. For a moment, before the electricity failed, she saw the
glowing filaments of the naked bulb. Rubble fell through the blackness,
burying her legs. Her arm was on fire. She cradled it against her chest.
(A useless gesture, when she would probably die in the next minutes.)
Was that the sound of running water? Was the basement they were in
flooding? She thought she heard a beep, the machine ready to record her
voice. Ramon, she cried, her mouth full of dust. She thought of his
long, meticulous fingers, how they could fix anything she broke. She
thought of the small red moles on his chest, just above the left nipple.
She wanted to say something important and consoling, something for him
remember her by. But she could think of nothing, and then her phone went
dead.